


Now you’re just somebody that I used to know

by sapphire_child



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: doctor_rose_fix, F/M, Fobwatched Doctor, Gen, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2019-01-22 22:18:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12492032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire_child/pseuds/sapphire_child
Summary: He is lonely despite himself, painting pictures of a girl that he sees only in his dreams. But as dreams turn to nightmare and love to loss the fragile seams of his existence begin to unravel, leaving his companion to pick up the pieces. But who will hold her together? AU set during season five.





	Now you’re just somebody that I used to know

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](https://doctor-rose-fix.livejournal.com/profile)[**doctor_rose_fix**](https://doctor-rose-fix.livejournal.com/) Holiday Fix A Thon for [this prompt](http://doctor-rose-fix.livejournal.com/233156.html?thread=5854916#t5854916)

**In an Artist's Studio**   
**by Christina Rossetti**

"One face looks out from all his canvases,  
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:  
We found her hidden just behind those screens,  
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.  
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,  
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,  
A saint, an angel -- every canvas means  
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.  
He feeds upon her face by day and night,  
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,  
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:  
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;  
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;  
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream."

 

* * *

 

 

He pours his life into her hands, trusting her absolutely in her efforts to keep him safe. It’s easily the most frightening thing the Doctor has asked of her. Even the TARDIS seems concerned, bucking and twisting crazily in the vortex before crash landing them in London.

It’s the 1970’s and he develops a taste for paisley and a dark corduroy coat which is fraying at the cuffs. She tries out bell bottoms and gets a casual job in a little shop and makes sure to come past to make him tea and remind him that he needs to eat every once in a while.

He seems to think he’s some sort of struggling artist type. She laughs at him at first when he starts spending the meagre income he gets from tutoring on paper and pastels, watercolours and canvases and an easel that never quite stands up straight.

He paints. Surprisingly well too, and in a very distinctive swirling style. He reminds her (heartbreakingly) of Vincent. His loneliness creeps over the cold floorboards and nips at her ankles no matter how much she tries to cheer him or praise his handiwork.

“These are really good,” she tells him, holding up a canvas covered with blooming flowers whilst he blushes his modesty. “You should try selling some. Make a few quid.”

He just waves off her flattery and stacks his work quietly away in a corner. Asks, “Who would buy them Pond?”

That much at least hasn’t changed.

“ _I_ would,” she tells him and he starts tidying compulsively. He does that now when he’s embarrassed. Whilst he’s distracted she spies a pile of sketches done in warm pastels on the table and riffles through them. “Seriously though. Get a few of this lot framed up, you could set up a little stall someplace. You could even do caricatures or...”

She stumbles to a halt and he looks up mildly only to hasten to her side when he sees which piece she has stopped at.

“That one shouldn’t be out,” he says, almost harshly. Snatching the picture back he rolls it up and stuffs it into a cupboard. His flustered demeanour suggests that he’s been caught out doing something he ought not and she can’t help but fall into her usual friendly ribbing to cover over the awkwardness.

“Pretty girl,” she drawls. “Friend of yours?”

He actually glares at her, a hint of the man he used to be, before mumble-grumbling awkwardly and slinking off to boil the kettle. But she has already memorised the striking features of the woman in the picture and she goes to bed that night thinking about her face.

She’s sure she’s seen her somewhere before.

 

 

 

Before long the mysterious woman is popping up in all sorts of places. He sketches her in charcoal and pastels and pencils. He splashes great swathes of pink and yellow across a canvas and bemoans the fact that he can never get the colour of her eyes right. And even when he is drawing other things she seems to appear without him even realising. She is the only flash of blonde hair in a crowd scene, a distinctive profile half turned away but betraying him in the upturn of her nose or the strong sweep of her jaw line.

“Who _is_ this girl?” she wonders, fascinated. She discovers a set of intimate charcoal portraits hidden away in a cupboard, a series of spectacular gowns all modelled by a girl with bold brows and knowing eyes. Even a myriad of fairytale characters all reinvented with the same face, the edges of the canvas sprinkled with gold dust.

The day that he paints a bouquet of roses and every single one has an impression of her face somewhere in its petals he finally admits that he’s been dreaming about her for weeks. He also has the grace to blush furiously when she teases him mercilessly about having naughty dreams about the subject of a drawing.

“It’s like getting all hot and heavy over the Mona Lisa or something,” she chortles, and then cackles even louder when he tries to make himself disappear into the neck of his coat like a corduroy turtle.

“Seriously though,” she continues, fishing tea leaves out of her mug with the end of what must be his only clean paintbrush. “She must’ve come from somewhere. The way you paint her...it’s like you _know_ her.”

“I’m not sure,” he says softly, fingering the edge of his most recent canvas like it might tell him all its secrets if he just presses the whorls of his fingertips against it for long enough. Like osmosis or something. “It’s like she’s somebody that I used to...only now I’ve gone and forgotten her.”

He laughs, a little hollowly, and she watches the reverent way he strokes the canvas. It’s another one done all up in pinks and yellows, all warm and ethereal and beautiful. The girl is wearing surprisingly modern clothing for once, dark trousers and a weirdly familiar red jacket.

It takes her several days before she finally realises where she knows it from.

 

 

 

She all but tears the wardrobe room apart in her search for the blasted coat. She’s sure she’s seen it in here before – would have worn it too if the sleeves hadn’t been too short. When she finally gives up, she heads back to her room. She needs to check her mobile and she might get a chance do some reading before she has to head back to her dingy little apartment.

Instead of the familiarity of her bunk bed and posters though, she finds herself throwing open someone else’s door, stepping into someone else’s _TARDIS_ – and it isn’t until she’s over the threshold that she quite realises her mistake.

She knew he travelled with other people, of course she did. But knowing a fact and seeing the leftover detritus of someone else’s life with the Doctor are two different things. Just being in this room makes her skin crawl. It feels wrong, like she’s trespassing or something, and so she does a slow circle in the glaring pink-ness before making as if to slip out.

A chill sweeps over her when her gaze falls on what must be a dresser. Scattered amongst the makeup and magazines are photographs and it’s her it’s her it’s _her_. Blonde hair, dark brows, a wide smiling mouth and laughing hazel eyes and she feels sick, like she’s some kind of voyeuristic freak but she can’t help but step forward and get a closer look.

“You didn’t come past for tea yesterday,” he says when she comes to see him after work the next day. He’s not upset, just confused.

“I had some things to take care of,” she lies and his eyebrows rise slightly but then he just sort of nods and shrugs it off.

“Oh, right. Yes of course.” He says in that hopeless, gentle way that he has and then he goes back to his sketching.

She itches to rub the charcoal off his nose but something about him, the way he stands as he sketches his lost girl in the fading light, she can’t quite bring himself to touch him.

What happened to her, she wonders? That smiling, beautiful girl who travelled with him on the TARDIS and then just left all of her things behind? Did she leave in a hurry or did she just not need them anymore? She has so many questions and so much time to wait before she can get the answers. She’s been ticking off the days on a calendar but it doesn’t help that she’s still the girl who is always waiting.

 

 

 

It takes her a few weeks to realise that he isn’t sleeping.

He always looks a bit thin and depressing, his eyes hollowing out the more he paints. But when she lets herself into his apartment and finds him passed out on the couch, brush still in hand she feels a slight twinge of concern.

She busies herself with a tin of condensed soup and she is stirring it into a concoction of some sort when he starts crying out. It’s an awful sound, a sobbing, retching sort of sound and she flies into the lounge to make sure he’s not dying or doing anything equally silly. Instead he terrifies her by lurching up and catching her by the collar when she tries to calm him.

“She’s gone!” he chokes, tears streaming and eyes unfocused. “I’ve lost her!”

“You’re safe,” she babbles, stroking his hair like he’s an upset puppy. “You’re fine. It’s okay now. Go back to sleep.”

His eyes roll and he sighs, sinking back down to the couch with a whimper.

“What the _hell_.” She whispers, gnaws on a thumbnail and sinks to the floorboards to watch him sleep. His face is twisted and there are paint stains on his cuffs. In the kitchen the soup boils over and she burns her hand trying to rescue it. She’s usually fine with stuff like that, never cried once when she had shots or broken bones or anything growing up. Now she howls and through the fog of it she hears him wake up, startle, and fall off the couch.

“What happened?” he asks, clucking and soothing as he presses a tea towel of ice cubes onto her raw hand. “Oh dear. I really think you should go to the doctor with this Pond, it’s looking awfully red...”

“Did you know you sleep talk?” she blurts, bursts into fresh tears and then cries the whole long walk to the surgery.

“Is it still hurting?” the doctor asks as he examines it and when she shakes her head vehemently he turns sympathetic. “It’s alright to cry dear. Nasty burn like this...you’re probably still in shock.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” she insists. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

 

 

 

He brings her home and asks her to stay with him in his canvas cluttered abode so he can look after her.

“I’ll even give you the bed.”

“You think you’re going to fit on this couch?”

“As if _you_ will, Miss Lanky Legs.”

She smacks his arm for good measure and then settles against him feeling unmistakably tired. It’s funny really. The two of them are so comfortable, so companionable and yet she still feels those creeping, lonely fingers reaching for her.

She misses. She yearns. For what she doesn’t quite know – but it isn’t to be travelling again and it isn’t to have him back. Not that she _doesn’t_ want both of those things but...well.

“I’m supposed to be worrying about _you_ ,” she mumbles stubbornly. “That’s my job.”

“And it’s mine to look after you,” he tucks her up underneath his arm and props his chin on her hair as he speaks. “Right bloody messes though we both may be.”

“Too right we are.” She mumbles and promptly falls asleep on his shoulder.

 

 

 

His nightmares get progressively worse. He barely sleeps and when he does it’s in fitful bursts interrupted by marathon painting sessions. He is like a man possessed – they can hardly move around the flat for the piles of paintings. And then he becomes ill, so consumed by his obsession that she has to force him to sleep, to eat. She loses her job when she takes too much time off to look after him but she can’t just leave him alone, delirious and feverish and splashing paint all over the place. He ruins most of the furniture and then his clothes and finally she breaks off her lease and moves in for good, the two of them pooling their meagre expenses to survive.

She counts down the days and they both grow slender and sickly. She becomes bad tempered and he gets even more ill. At the height of his fevered nightmares she has to tell him who he is. That the girl he dreams of is gone and that he has to go back to being a man who remembers why.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him, pressing frenzied kisses to his sodden brow. “I’m so sorry. But I have to bring you back now. I can’t _do_ this anymore.”

How they manage to survive the ensuing battle she doesn’t quite remember but the flat is all but decimated by the time they escape out onto the street. They stare up at the carnage, listening to the wail of approaching sirens and then the Doctor takes her thin, bony hand with his and they run.

Behind them the fire consumes every last painting, like they never existed in the first place.

 

 

 

Their first stop, he announces when they reach the TARDIS, is for food. But when she suggests chips he baulks and they wind up eating an entire packet of stale biscuits between them instead.

“Doctor,” she presses up against the console next to him, trying to ignore her reflection in the glass and the sharpness of bone beneath her skin. “That girl you did all those paintings of when you were human. Who was she?”

For a moment she thinks he might not answer her. He certainly does a very good job of ignoring her as he flips dials. But then he pauses with his hand on the typewriter and looks her full in the face.

She very nearly takes a step back. Not from fear you understand, but from uncertainty that she really wants to know the answer she has waited for.

The Doctor opens his mouth and lets out a quiet sigh. And then his eyes drop and just before he returns to his work he offers up his answer with all the resignation of a man with a long broken heart.

“Her name,” he tells her. “Was Rose.”

Inexplicably, she feels the pressure of tears behind her eyes and she has to blink them back and clear her throat before she continues.

“Was she nice?” she blurts and immediately wishes she hadn’t. It’s a stupid question – a naive, awkward, girlish question. The Doctor looks startled though, not as if he thinks she’s asked him something that is completely dim-witted. He looks down, a smile touching his lips that’s almost bashful and she marvels.

“Yes,” he says softly. “Yes.”

Amy never quite has the gall to bring her up again.


End file.
